Glen Phillips
Winter Pays for Summer

Like many artistically-inclined songwriters, Glen Phillips suffers from a
lack of confidence in his abilities, and for him, this tends to manifest itself
in a cyclical pattern of self-fulfillment and self-destruction. In other words,
his finest achievements have come when expectations were low, and he typically
has followed his successes with outings that not only felt safe, but also were
utterly generic in tone. After guiding Toad the Wet Sprocket in the creation of
its pop gem Dulcinea, for example, Phillips’ former band issued the bland
Coil, and although the decline in quality could have been explained by
the subsequent announcement of his ensemble’s disbandment, he now appears to be
falling into a similar pattern with his solo career.

Indeed, coming in the wake of the understated gracefulness of Abulum —
an outing that no one really expected to be quite as good as it was — Phillips’
sophomore effort Winter Pays for Summer is merely an indistinct affair on
which he tries too hard to chase the marketplace’s current infatuation with the
sounds of the ’70s and ’80s. Consequently, the gambit fails because he can’t
seem to determine into which niche he should position himself. Part of the
problem, undoubtedly, is the employment of producer John Fields (Switchfoot,
Andrew W.K.), who slathers the collection with the sort of crisp,
run-of-the-mill, tricks of the trade that dilute Phillips’ songs and make them
sound more manufactured than organic. In fact, half of the album’s tracks — such
as Falling, Finally Fading, Gather, and most egregiously,
the first single Thankful — seem geared towards placement on a teen
television show or, worse, they seem designed to fit within the disposable
confines of a music downloading service.

The other half of the material on Winter Pays for Summer fares
somewhat better, if only because its softer edges strive for the pensive, adult
contemporary worlds of James Taylor (Simple), Cat Stevens (Released),
The Eagles (Don’t Need Anything), and Jackson Browne (Courage),
thereby framing Phillips’ maturing lyrical sense with honest, intimate
arrangements. Throughout the album, he reflects upon the pain and joy that life
can bring, and he binds his suite of songs together with the understanding that
the strength that keeps him afloat comes from his surrounding circle of family
and friends. However, despite the invocation of an array of special guests — Ben
Folds and Jellyfish’s Andy Sturmer provide backing vocals; several tracks were
co-written with Semisonic’s Dan Wilson; and the band that supports him includes
drummer Pete Thomas (Elvis Costello) as well as guitarists Michael Chavez (John
Mayer), Greg Suran (Goo Goo Dolls), and Jon Brion (Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann) —
Phillips uses his associates as a crutch rather than allowing them to serve as
his inspiration. In inflating his music to gargantuan size, he conforms to
someone else’s vision of who he should be. As a result, he loses sight of who he
is, and his poetic intuition becomes lost in the shuffle. It’s when Phillips is
his most personal — on both a musical and lyrical level — that he makes music
that matters, and unfortunately, much of Winter Pays for Summer simply
fails to resonate. ½

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